Crow-Work

Poems

Eric Pankey author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Milkweed Editions

Published:5th Feb '15

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Crow-Work cover

"What is a song but a snare to capture the moment?" Eric Pankey asks in his new collection, Crow-Work. This central question drives Pankey's ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art. Through subjects as diverse as Brueghel's Procession to Calvary, Anish Kapoor's Healing of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio's series of severed heads, and James Turrell's experimentation with light and color, the author travels to an impossible past, despite being firmly rooted in the present, to seek out "the songbird in every thorn thicket" of the artist's work. Short bursts of lyrical beauty burn away "like coils of incense ash," bodies in the light of a cave flicker, coalesce and disappear. By capturing the ephemeral beauty of life in these poems, Crow-Work seeks not only to explain great art, but also to embody it.

Advance Praise for Crow-Work "Eric Pankey's sensibility is an unerringly generous one: he is always willing to step first onto unsteady ground, to test it for those who might follow. The poems of Crow-Work, like good gleaners, seek out possibility and sustenance. They are skilled, deft, and dazzlingly alert. Just when I think they have brought me as close as possible to the dark and unknowable things that make awe possible, they bring me closer. The journey is unnerving, intimate, and thrilling." --Mary Szybist "The delicacy and accuracy we have come to expect from Eric Pankey are here on display and as deftly deployed as ever. Pankey remains one of our leading practitioners of the metaphysical poem." --C. Dale Young Select Praise for Eric Pankey and Previous Works: "Pankey's poems, whether lyric or prose, are touching, sincere, and sublime and work well as a whole." --Library Journal "Eric Pankey is a poet of precise observation and startling particularities." --Jane Hirshfield "In language that is always elegant, complex, and rigorously truthful, Eric Pankey transfixes us with glimpses of what we can never fully know." --Chase Twichell

ISBN: 9781571314543

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 127g

96 pages